Removing Hops from Beer

AlexH

So someone at a brewery I know quite well made what could politely be described as a boo boo (or impolitely as a major f**kup) and ended up with 180 kegs of off beer. Like, seriously foul off. Sitting out in the sun for months off.

It's a shame to see all that booze go down the drain and I'd like to recycle it if I could. I've tried reading up as much as I can, so I already know the hop oils will carry through into the spirit if I just run iffy beer through a still and I'll most likely end up coating the inside of the equipment with burnt hop oil residue.

My reckoning is that if you can get hops into beer, you should be able to get them out again but just running it through a still doesn't seem like the best way of doing it.

Does anyone have any ideas? Filters? Gasification? Other processes?

180 kegs of 5% ABV beer is obviously a fair bit of booze and doesn't happen very frequently, but I come across dodgy kegs and other waste on a regular basis so I'd be up for building a permanent recycling facility if I can figure out how to do it.

jacksonbrown

Neutral? You might need a lot of plates though, depending how rank it is.

AlexH

@jacksonbrown said: Neutral? You might need a lot of plates though, depending how rank it is.

Not expecting to make anything particularly wonderful with it. Plain neutral run through a lot of carbon would be fine, but the issue is getting the hops out of it first.

And yeah, its pretty awful. Ideally I'd like to be able to build something that can recycle whatever I throw at it.

jacksonbrown

Well you've got plenty to experiment with. I'd just run it and go from there.

Unsensibel

Why try to get it out? Some hops notes are quite pleasant in spirits. You could use it as a base for gin with a twist.

punkin

Pretty sure it was @rossco who just did quite a few kegs of free beer? Or maybe it was someone else.....

LousyMemoryPunkin

AlexH

@Unsensibel said: Why try to get it out? Some hops notes are quite pleasant in spirits. You could use it as a base for gin with a twist.

Basically for consistency. Blending everything together is an option but waste IPA is going to be very different from waste red ale and since I don't know when or how much stuff is going to be available, it'd probably be best to just rip as much as I can out and just focus on recovering the ethanol.

Any ideas what would happen if I left the beer out in the sun for a while? Would deliberately inducing skunk degrade the iso-alpha acids to the point where I'd be able to (somehow) remove them more easily through another process, e.g. filtering? Or would the degraded hop acids just run through into feints more easily and not carry through into the spirit as much?

Kapea

You could always make a shitload of malt vinegar.

FWIW - I do not like the taste of hops in distilled spirits. It is not pleasant.

zymurgybob

Second Kapea on the desirability of distilled hop taste, but could oxidation take the odor out of the hop compounds? I'd take a small sample and try doctoring it a bit with hydrogen peroxide. You might be able to get a usable neutral out of that.

AlexH

Yeah, I've tried hopped spirit. It's...interesting...on a theoretical level, but I've yet to taste one that I liked.

Hmm, so I've now got two possible directions: kill the hops and recover the alcohol, or forget the alcohol, feed it to acetobacter and make vinegar.

Think I'll need to do some experiments for both.

I can always distill the vinegar and use it as cleaner, right?

Kapea

You can use Bragg Organic Apple Cider Vinegar for your inoculant. It has live bacteria.

grim

Always wanted to age vinegar in ex-Bourbon barrels.

Swedish_Pride

could you not strip it in a pot still and have it filtering through a cloth on the other side to get rid of the oil and possible carbon if the hoptaste is god awful. For that amount of likker it's worth a keg and a simple pot to get wrecked

CothermanDistilling

hopped beer - not an issue for me... sour beer due to acetic acid.... that can come through in distillation will make neutral, but not whiskey...

CothermanDistilling

do a find on 'acetic' in this article:

Nancy Fraley’s Professional “Nose” Knows When the Mash Is Actually Sour

Unsensibel

@grim said: Always wanted to age vinegar in ex-Bourbon barrels.

Aren't you in the perfect position to do so???